Author Comments

Each level you will be presented with five words that have been coded into a cypher. You find these words by swapping the letter tiles to the correct position.
For example: 'A' might equal 'B' in the code etc.
When a correct letter is place in the proper slot the letter will turn green.
If you're stuck you can buy a letter to help you out, but be careful, you only have so many moves.

Reviews

Rated 5 / 5 stars2013-04-08 23:57:58

I liked the game as is. It took me a while to figure out how to work the game but granted I didnt read the instructions. While some people say get rid of the excess letters, I like it because it adds to the challenge. Although giving the option to add categories or just random words would be nice.

Rated 4 / 5 stars2013-04-08 20:37:01

Right now, I think this game is a good concept: It's basically like codebreaker. If you can master something like this, you can do pretty well with most word games would be my opinion. It's definitely challenging to me even as an English major.
It flows well, and I get no lag from the operation of the game.
Buying a letter is very Wheel of Fortunesque, and I was half tempted to hear the jingle when I bought one. It would be a good sound effect to add if you wanted to spruce the game up a bit more.

The problem is, most of these words are way too long and, like others have said, there's no general category for them, so it's basically a lot of guess work. I would try to make sure that the game, at least at the start, has generally shorter words as an introduction or at least a tutorial section away from the actual game where players can get accustomed to the game with smaller words before heading out into such 8-12 letter gems as incompetency and hysteria. I'm not saying to dumb it down, just ease into it a little more.

Other than that, I was originally confused with the letter pool at the bottom vs. the letter pool at the top. Once I realized you don't use every letter it wasn't as bad, but I think another thing that might help a bit is, instead of using all 26 letters to choose from, make it so that only the relevant letters to the puzzle at hand are in the top bar and get rid of the bottom word pool altogether. It would give players a better sense of direction when trying to figure out all the words, and since all the letters in the cypher are the same, the added 8-10 which aren't used is just a bit of overkill on the challenge.

Rated 3.5 / 5 stars2013-04-07 16:52:03

Interesting game, but it would be better improved perhaps by an idea of the potential words that could come up. For instance, grouping the words under a genre or category that could assist with word association. Frequency analysis is not something that every player is capable of, and limiting the moves adds to the difficultly but doesn't help them learn the puzzles or potential words any faster. Rather than limiting the moves, maybe put things on a time bonus. Include hints as to the potential words, then allow the player to take the hints and apply them to the cyphers without giving away free letters. Then you also wouldn't have to include the earning back of moves to continue playing.

Puzzle games should be rewarding, but you shouldn't try to stop the player from playing the game. Certainly not when the potential permutations of the game are far too varied to box them into an arbitrary number of moves before you decide to simply stop letting them play.